We sat down at the table with the large bowl in the middle. Its earthy smell wafted up with the steam. Everyone looked expectant and excited, even Agata.

“What is this?” I asked.

Hania looked around the group, everyone smiling at my question. “Zupa,” she said, meaningfully. “Poppy-stem soup. It will send you flying.”

Her black eyes gleamed. You were sitting next to her and nodded at me encouragingly. She served me the first cup and handed it across the table. All eyes were on me. I held the cup to my lips and downed it in its entirety, pouring it into myself like medicine. I wanted to dissolve with it. There was a dark-brown taste to it, bitter, unforgiving. They smiled at me and followed my lead, all drinking too. We sat around looking at one another, Hania rubbing my hand across the table, giggling. You held her hand and Maksio’s hand. We all took one another’s hands and formed a chain. And moments later—or was it more than that?—we were all sitting on the couches, spread out, joyous. My body was weightless. There was nothing on my mind, nothing at all; it was so light it floated. I saw you sitting near me, and all I felt was love. I closed my eyes and saw fields, and flowers, and the lake, the lake from that summer, and everything was there for me, only for me, and I loved myself—all of it, every atom—like I never had before. The music that was playing was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Every word of it—it was Serge Gainsbourg singing in French—I understood. It carried messages I had never expected there were. And we danced. You and me, Hania and you, me and her. Agata and Maksio. All of us together.

I was warm, so warm. The fire was burning, heat enveloped us, and we started to undress, dreamlike, entranced. Looking at one another, like children, without a trace of shame. One by one, clothes fell to the ground—jeans and skirts and shirts and blouses, socks and pants. Until we were all naked, the air on our white bodies, the night around our pale skin. We were an army of erotic ghosts. And we were all beautiful. Hania and Agata with their dark triangles between their thighs and their breasts like overripe fruit, Agata rounder and softer than Hania, whose skin was translucent, blindingly white, a Venus and a nymph. Maksio, his fleshy body like Samson, a colossus, his penis massive like a bull’s, his chest hairy and broad like a drum. But you were the most beautiful of them all. Your body was made of marble and absorbed the light of the moon.